Error Handling in Rust — Result, Option and the ? Operator for Bulletproof Code

Every developer moving to Rust from exception-based languages hits the same moment: you write a function, call read_to_string, and you're staring at a Result. Then you reach for unwrap(), the app crashes, and you curse the compiler. At Meteora Web, we've been there — we migrated a production microservice from Go to Rust. After the initial frustration, we realized: error handling in Rust isn't a hurdle, it's a superpower. It forces you to handle every case, and the result is software that never falls over for a trivial mistake. In this guide we cover the three core tools: Result, Option, and the ? operator. No abstract theory — code you'll ship today.